Talking Donald Trump: A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity by Jennifer Sclafani

Author:Jennifer Sclafani
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: politics, linguistics
ISBN: 9781138244504
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Constructed dialogue in a dialogic context

Thus far, I have only considered Trump’s use of constructed dialogue in a monologic context, but as other scholars have noted (Kuo, 2001; Lauerbach, 2006), constructed dialogue plays an important role in dialogic political discourse contexts like debates and interviews as well. Interestingly, when the use of constructed dialogue by Trump in the debates is compared to the examples just described in the monologic context of his candidacy announcement speech, a different pattern emerges. In the debate context, Trump does construct voices of others in his talk, but rather than revoicing personal interactions that contain a two-way dialogue, his direct reports of speech – including both self- and other-quotation – are one-way interactions. An additional difference that surfaces is the types of others whose voices are constructed by Trump. Whereas in his announcement speech, the individual referred to could be identified by the audience, whether in terms of biographical or categorical identification (Schiffrin, 1977; Schegloff, 1968), the people whose voices Trump animates in the debate tend to be more vaguely referenced. Both types of constructed dialogue – self-reports and vague other-reports – tend to perform the same function of amplifying Trump’s own voice and the position he is taking in the interactional context of the debate.

First, let us examine instances in which Trump voices his own past speech in the debates. Extract (14) comes from the August 6 debate in Cleveland and illustrates Trump’s response to moderator Chris Wallace’s request for Trump to share proof regarding his allegations that the Mexican government is sending criminals across the border:

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